The Moon's Dog

Brand new fiction by E. Avery Cale

Image via Legacy | Luxury Chalet in Denali National Park, Alaska

I awoke to a terrible scream, and as I woke, I knew it was a dream and the scream was still in the dream and the scream was fading, not because I was waking or was moving away but because the screamer saw me coming toward her and was hiding and quieting her voice so I couldn’t find her. When I opened my eyes, I could see my breath rising in white plumes. Droplets of condensation stuck to the bars of the bed above.

The window was open a few inches.

I’d opened it before going to bed. It was hot in the room, and the thermostat didn’t work.

After I shut the window, I got my smokes and walked down the dark hall through the gym, the laundry room, and the shop. No need to turn on the lights. The layout hadn’t changed. On the ramp outside, I smoked and looked at the moon.

I started looking at other things, remembering the names of constellations, the names of stars I hadn’t seen since moving to town. I tried to find the Mountain in the Sky to the southeast. I thought I could make out her shape. Toward the southwest, I saw a star I didn’t recognize, blue and white, twinkling, low in the sky. Sirius, I thought, but that didn’t seem right. Maybe Venus, but Venus would have already set by that time of night. As I watched and tried to decide what it was, a yellow light came up toward it from the south and stopped a few degrees off. The blue star then moved over toward it, and they sat there together for a while. I couldn’t tell you how long, but I know when I thought to look down at my cigarette, it had all turned to ash between my fingers. When I looked back up at the two stars, the blue floated back toward where it started, and the yellow went back in the direction it had come. As it went, it faded out, and as it faded, it left a tail as a comet might. The blue one stopped about where it had started. A cold wind started to blow. I felt naked. I realized I’d been sweating, and my hands started to shake. I went back inside.

I tried to take out another cigarette. My hands were shaking too badly. The tips of my ring fingers, where I’d worn through my gloves some winters ago, were starting to ache.

The sun eventually rose. I could see the top of it through the wide windows.

I went outside to have a better look at it. I saw that it was coming up in the wrong place, almost due south and a little west where it should have been rising almost due east this time of year. It moved wrong, too, moving low over the tops of the trees across the river and weaving as it came. If it came over the schoolyard, a man standing on the slide could reach up and snatch it.

Before it got to the river, I managed to breathe again and get myself inside and get the door shut behind me. I sat there behind the door for the rest of the night.

The real sun had been up a while when I looked back out the window. The smoke from the downtown cabins rose weakly from the chimneys, lay over the streets, and covered them; the puddles in the streets were frozen over, and the crests of mud left by four-wheeler tracks were crusted in frost.

I’d gone through my pack of smokes and needed to get to Belettes’ store. Walking would keep me warm, though I only had a canvas jacket and wool sweater.

I walked the mile or so down to the other end of town and up to the store. I tried the Belettes’ door. It was locked. I knocked. Nothing. Jean was always up with the dawn. Moose season was in full swing; maybe he was up in the mountains.

I took the long way back, behind the new HUD houses, my reflection distorted and queer in the empty windows. Past the firebreak, spruce grouse were pecking around on the bare trail. They didn’t move until I was within grabbing distance, and even then, they fluttered only a couple of feet off the trail. I heard a plane coming in. Small one, sounded like a 206. I caught a glimpse of the tail as he passed over, and if I read the tail number right, it was one I knew: Regis Skyways. Maybe I could hitch a ride. I couldn’t be here another night.

Everyone was already at the airstrip to meet the plane when I arrived. I said hello to Phillip, Jr. and, to make small talk, asked if Jean was still out at Little Sinai. They were cousins by marriage, even if Jean was a gussak.

“You never heard, I guess. You never saw it on Facebook?”

I told him I didn’t have one of those.

“Me neither. Figured all you young guys did, though. Anyway. This is his one-year plane. The stuff for Jean’s one year is on this plane.”

Jean was dead. I asked what had happened.

“Pretty strange, you know. Shooting at ravens back behind his house. With his .22. That’s what they told me anyway. Never knew him not to be careful. He wouldn’t keep it chambered. Said he slipped; that’s what they said. In his bunny boots, you know, like he always wore. Pretty slick on the bottom. Don’t chamber till you’re ready and on the target. He knew that. Just can’t believe it.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither one of us could say the alternative that we both knew was sitting there staring at us from just beyond saying. Shooting ravens. Bad luck, Jean knew that, even if he did it sometimes too. Since it was bad luck, no one would ever have to wonder if it was something else.

“He got that calcinosis. Agatha had it too. Just painful; everybody could see that. For her, it was. They say it ain’t something you can catch, but I dunno. Seems to me you can, since everybody got it now, seems like. Agatha, Anne, Jean, Ann, John. Spreading around, but they say it can’t do that. Spreads at least as much as COVID. Like cancer. They say that it can’t spread around, either, but it sure seems to me like it jumps around. I never knew about that stuff.”

I asked if he thought the pilot would take a hitchhiker.

“Go ahead, ask him. You might as well.”

When they got it unloaded, I explained my situation to the pilot and asked if maybe I could catch a ride. He looked at me like he knew me. “Got your app? Can’t take anyone without checking their footprint.”

I told him I didn’t have any reception and, anyway, it was a work trip; I was on the district’s footprint.

“I believe you. Still can’t do anything without checking that app.”

While we were talking, R.J. parked his four-wheeler a little ways off and walked up. There was a woman sitting on his bike with her hoodie up.

“Was wondering, can I get a ride right over to McArthur and back?” A booze run. The woman looked familiar.

“Sure,” grinned the pilot. “You ready now?” To me, he said, “Tribal member. Exempt from footprint checks. You should know that. You’ve been around.”

It had been a while since I’d been around here.

As they taxied down, I went and sat on the bench under the sign that read “Fyodersville International Airport, population 79.” I tried not to think of what I’d seen. A moose stood in the willows across the turnaround. I could see the tips of his antlers were still covered in velvet. I’d seen something like it before when I was leaving Phoenix to join Jaynie up here. Smart moose, sticking too close to town for anyone to shoot.

Jesus Christ, I’d said, and the old man sitting next to me said How do you mean that? The girl on the bike blew a kiss at the plane as it left the ground. Do you mean that as an invocation or as a swear? There was a field of fireweed at the end of the runway. Either way, I guess it probably works the same, and that’s why he disappeared like that. It had all bolted. You noticed that, didn’t you? The white fuzz was floating lazily up after the plane. Disappeared just as you called upon the name of the Lord. Coming in the day before, I noticed the field, the unbroken pink. I’d heard that works, but last time I froze up. It took a couple of weeks of falling temperatures to get all the flowers to turn white like that and turn to fuzz. I hope I don’t see them again, but I probably will and if I do I hope I remember that what you did and call out the name of the Lord because I’ve heard that it’s on the third time, if you’ve already seem ‘em twice and then you do one more time, that’s the last time anybody’ll see you. Wonder what was different. That’s the way it was with that hiker at Crazy Mountain. Others I heard of too, third time you see them, and you’re gone, not the third time they seen you though. I imagine they’re always watching.

All the fuzz on the fireweed fell off at once like it had been shorn by the hand of some giant unseen shepherdess. I got up and walked back to the school.

The sun shone through the window into my little room. I could hear Miss Waitshrill scolding a child in her classroom, and I heard the other teacher shut his door. I shut my door and lay on my sleeping bag in the warm sun and fell asleep.

The front door slammed. I’d been sleeping all day. I hadn’t dreamt. Voices in the gym were setting up for the one year. When I stepped out of the room, a young woman was standing in the open door to the foyer.

It was the girl from R.J.’s bike. Renee.

“Can we talk?”

The office was locked. We went down to the library.

“Do you know how to pray for me?”

I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I’m sorry. I hate to ask. But can you? Do you know how?”

I told her I didn’t know any of their prayers—the Orthodox prayers; I knew parts of the Hail Mary and parts of the Sinner’s Prayer, but I couldn’t remember which was which, and she stopped me before I overexplained more.

“The priest didn’t come. I was hoping he would.”

It took me a while to think of what to say, and she said, “I’m sorry. It’s fine. I’ll be fine. I’ll see you.”

She left. I passed the other teacher’s classroom. There were papers all over his desk. A movie was playing on the smartboard, and he was playing on his phone. He wore a loose dress shirt to hide his stomach, but it wasn’t working. He looked up and saw me.

“Hey, brother, could you shut that door? They get so loud at those things. Please? I got grading to do.”

Betty John hugged me when I walked into the gym, and she put me in line between her and her honey. I’d missed the blessing. I’d walked into the foyer right as Phillip, Jr. was saying “…And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one,” and waited out of sight until everyone started to get in line.

“Where’s your honey? Does she still work with crazy people? Oh shucks,” she laughed, “Don’t mean to say it like that, I just don’t know how else to say it. I’m sorry, mister.”

They always had a hard time with my name in the villages.

“She had to work, or what, your honey?” asked Gerald before Betty had finished apologizing. She was a psychiatric consultant for the Center for Trauma-Informed Assessment and Reassignment. Her husband sat on the board. He’d been her advisor for her second thesis. I told them that yes, she had to work, and yes, she still worked with the crazy people.

“Must keep her pretty busy.”

“You’re back teaching again, or what? Kids would like that, you know.”

I asked them about Miss Waitshrill.

“Just special that lady is,” said Betty. “Hate to be mean, but it’s so true. Last year, during the Iditarod, she made the kids spend the whole time working on this big, beautiful poster with all their artwork on it, just so she could give it away to the first musher into town and get her picture taken.”

She’d been around a few years now, since not long after I’d left, and there was a lot to be said for sticking around, which I pointed out. I asked about the new guy.

Miss Betty gave me one of her looks that said mister, how could you even ask when you already know the answer? She then lowered her voice and whispered loudly, “There’s something not right about that guy. You know what I mean?”

I knew what she meant. I told her he wouldn’t make it to Christmas. Gerald raised his eyebrows, then he shrugged his shoulders.

“I hope you’re right, mister,” said Betty.

“Maybe you come back when he leaves,” said Gerald. “You wanna go out moose hunting tomorrow? Bright and early, we’re leaving, me and Phil, Jr. and the grandkids. Just gotta take my motor out and fix it tonight. Or we can go get that big bull moose down by the airport. You saw that bull moose? Just nice, he is. Nice and fat. Velvet still, and he won’t have any smell. Nobody’ll say anything. Are you busy tomorrow or what?

I told him I’d be out tomorrow on the mail plane.

“Mail plane canceled already,” said Betty. “Too few pilots, and that new one they have is sick. Happens a lot lately.”

“What the hell were you doing out here anyway if you didn’t come to teach?” asked Gerald.

Miss Waitshrill had called in a panic because the fax was out, and she was working on this grant, and she had to get that signed assurance in, or they’d give the funds to somebody else, and someone needed to get out here and fix this thing before we lost the funds, and since I was the newest, they made me go. She’d unplugged the fax line from the wall to plug in the long-distance one. In two minutes, I’d spotted the problem, and in twenty more I’d gotten through the piles of old timesheets, environmental impact forms, and fire drill reports. By this time, I’d already waited two hours for her to get off the phone and let me into the office. When she finally got off the phone and opened the door, she told me the same thing she’d told me in the email, and while she was telling me this, I heard my plane landing. While I was plugging the ethernet cables back into their right places, I heard it taking off again.

I told Gerald I’d come to fix the fax machine, but I got stuck.

“You’re a ninja” said Betty, “sneaking in and not telling anyone.”

We’d come to the serving table, and I filled my plate with moose heart soup, boiled moose brisket, boiled black bear ribs, boiled goose, pasta salad, egg salad, salted whitefish roe, and a Dixie cup of fish ice cream. I asked Gerald for a smoke.

“What do you mean, anything, good stuff, anything?”

I didn’t smoke good stuff anymore and told him so. The good stuff had been Jaynie’s idea; she’d said it would help with my anxiety. I didn’t tell him that.

“I got rollyourowns, you like rollyourowns? Or you don’t know how or what? ”

I knew how.

‘Cause you roll your own joints, that’s how come you know how. I don’t believe you quit. How come you quit?”

I told him I didn’t like the smell.

Everyone had pretty much eaten by then, and the kids were starting to get wild. Something splatted against the back of my head. I turned, and there was a girl standing there staring at me. She was a little one. I leaned down to pick up her beanbag, and when I straightened back up, all the old women were looking at me. I handed the little girl the beanbag, and she ran off again.

“Renee’s girl,” said Betty.

She didn’t have Renee’s brown eyes, and her hair was dirty blonde. There was something familiar about her that I couldn’t place.

“Such a sweetheart, like her sister Perina. You never met her. Strange name. Pretty though. I worry about that one. Just young she is, and already so boy crazy. She can’t help it, though, mister. She doesn’t see better, you know what I mean? I feel bad for her mom, too. You know what she did? That dumb lady. Decided she wanted another baby, went into town, and came back with one. She was smart, though. Didn’t drink the whole time. Daddy must have been an Iron Dogger. Timing adds up. And you know how they are. Hate to be rude, mister, but it’s the truth. Where is her mommy anyway? She was here a second ago.”

She looked at me. I looked around the room like I wasn’t sure who she was talking about. I didn’t ask about the dad. After the dishes were done, I stepped outside to roll a smoke. The birches around the new powerplant had turned golden. I thought it was the sunlight, but when the wind rose, a couple of leaves floated down and twisted and stayed golden when they landed in the shadows. The wind blew harder, and more leaves fell, and then they all fell. Most years, that took three weeks at least. I stood there and thought about that for a while before going inside to put on another pot of coffee.

“Now, why did they make another pot of coffee? Now what is the point of that?”

It was Miss Waitshrill. I told her I’d made it.

“Kinda late, ain’t it?”

It was. I tried to get her talking about how cold it was so early in the year, but she didn’t seem interested, so I asked her about that grant, and she went on for a while. It was for art supplies. She had the neatest project planned for the Iditarod. She couldn’t thank me enough for getting out of here and making that happen for the kids.

I asked her how much the grant was for.

“Nine hundred dollars.”

My ticket cost $1,200, one-way.

I put a rock in the front door to keep it from closing and climbed up the slide to look at the Mountain. Renee swung around the end of the school on R.J.’s four-wheeler, around the graveyard, then she opened the throttle and took off toward Glenn’s. The road ended in a swamp not far past his house. Betty had told me about Renee’s cousin finding her in that sagging house she lived in past the edge of town, her two girls hiding in the closet and Renee throwing salt at the walls and at the girls and the house freezing because she hadn’t put wood on the fire all night and the cousin said she’d found a book there, a journal of some kind, and took and hid it.

How far could you see, standing on that Mountain? To the shadows at the end of the world. I thought about standing there by the ocean in Ilwaco at Jaynie’s stepdad’s beach house and thinking God must have made the world round so a man wouldn’t go mad from looking out and seeing it all at once. When I pulled my hand from the railing, the cold metal pulled back. Windblown snow spooled out from the Mountain. The sun sank a little lower on the horizon, and I watched her turn from white to pink to blue before disappearing completely.

I lay in my sleeping bag thinking about a lot of things, not all of them worth thinking about. The last time I’d seen Renee was shortly after Jaynie had gotten her tattoo. She’d gone downstate for a conference, and when she came back, she’d caught the mail run into the village and snuck under the covers while I was at school to surprise me. After that, she’d asked me how I liked it, and I said it was great, and she said, “The tattoo.” I’d had the clarity not to say what I thought, but not enough to not say that it was distracting, which was sexist and which I should have known was sexist. What I’d meant was that it was ugly, but that was sexist by definition, and so “distracting” had slipped out.

Then she told me she had a unique opportunity for a young scholar like herself to present at a conference in the Virgin Islands during the second weekend in February. I’d be in Anchorage that weekend for a conference of my own. I’d rented an Airbnb for us. It had a king bed that you could lie in and see the ocean. I’d stayed there one night, slept on the couch, and in the morning drank my coffee on the porch and watched a freighter coming in and listened to the sluice of the ice against the sides. The host let me switch to a smaller unit in Midtown for the same price, the last in a row of six units in a one-story building next to a five-story satellite dish. When I opened the door into the hall, I could hear televisions and children, and it smelled like Fabuloso. At least my room didn’t have a king bed or an ocean view.

Later, when I went to pick up my DoorDash, a door halfway down opened, and an islander woman stuck her head out, looked at me, then closed it again, and I heard her lock it. Walking back with my food, the door next to mine opened, and there was a native girl standing there. She looked familiar.

“Oh, I thought maybe that was our food,” she said.

I told her maybe it was, and maybe I was stealing it. I recognized her. She’d been in my geometry class online two or three years ago. She’d dropped the class, and when I stepped into the room to let her inspect the food, I saw why. There was a little girl sitting on the bed watching an iPad. She looked just like her mom. We talked for a little while. She was the kind of girl Jaynie liked to help. Young, but old enough to have made mistakes that couldn’t be undone. Fatherless, but that wasn’t causative. Experienced trauma at the hands of mom’s various boyfriends; causative. Lots of half-siblings; no full ones. Not too pretty. Not too smart.

We talked until the little girl fell asleep.

“She’ll be fine if we’re just next door,” she said.

Afterwards, I thought about calling Jaynie and telling her that I’d been drunk. Then I thought of getting drunk and calling Jaynie because then I couldn’t weasel my way out. If I called her sober, I wouldn’t be able to say anything. If I called her drunk, she might not believe me, and she might even excuse me.

When she’d finished her first Master’s, I’d asked her a question that had always bothered me. Why is it that people are so much more honest when they drink? We’d already been engaged a while, so I knew what she would say, which was that we embody our personalities through the inhibitions we create to protect ourselves from our traumas. So, by artificially, well, I don’t want to say artificially, by strategically using a substance that lowers our responsiveness to traumatically and socially formed inhibitions, we reform the initial conditions to our pre-traumatic stance, and from there we can experience and share from a place of honesty.

Instead of all that, what she said was, “I never really thought about it. It never came up in class.”

In the morning, I called my superintendent and told her I’d had a medical emergency, and I called Betty and told her how to divvy out my things, and then I took an Uber to the shelter downtown. I knew what to say to make sure I could get behind HIPAA, so I wouldn’t have to talk to Jaynie at all.

Her tattoo read “Nevertheless, She Persisted” across her decolletage.

I took the old bottle of melatonin from the bottom of my backpack. Any more than half a gummy and I’d wake up groggy and hungover. I took two.

When I woke, it was the middle of the night, and I was covered in sweat. I’d had dreams. Most of them I couldn’t remember. In the end, I was on a floating staircase above a sandy floor and platforms and staircases fractalled off into shadow above. On the lowest platform, sixty feet from the ground, three girls sat on the edge, swinging their legs. I was above them, a story above them, and I shouted, “What are you doing down there?” And the oldest one said, “Waiting,” and the littler ones didn’t say anything. “For what?” And she said, “My mom told us we’d know it when we got there,” and I wondered if we were moving. I couldn’t tell; there were no vantage points. “Want to watch me do a trick, mister?” said the older one, and she scooted away from the other ones a few inches. She lifted her hips up, so she was holding herself up by her arms and hovering off the platform, and she tucked her legs up under herself and stuck them out straight behind, then raised them up over her hips to do a handstand. She leaned her shoulders forward a little and slid right off the edge without a sound. She floated slowly. I grabbed the middle one and covered her eyes so she wouldn’t see the impact—the bones shattering and shooting out, the spray of blood, but she was down on the platform with her sister, and I was too far.

We all watched and no one made a sound and the other two were waiting for their turn and I couldn’t do anything.

The white cloud of my breath was lying across my face like it was trying to smother me. The window was open again. I must have opened it in my sleep. As I closed the window, I looked out at fresh snow on the ground and footprints in the snow. They lead to the boiler house. None led back out.

When I opened the back door, I felt the hairs in my nose freeze and stiffen. The metal nosepiece of my glasses made a single popping sound. I ran to the boiler house, turned on the light, and tried to look around while I waited for the fog on my lens to clear. I took a flashlight from the worktable under the breaker box and peered into the hole in the wall where the glycol lines ran into the school. A nest of mud swallows, dog yard hay from the Iditarod, human hairs, and fishing line and grouse feathers scattered about, the remains of the nests of other sorts of birds. Delicate filigree skeletons of hatchlings or maybe pre-hatchlings lay neatly atop the mess. Dust. Wet spots must have been condensation dripping off the lines.

This time, I was ready for the cold, and it didn’t knock the breath out of me. I knelt down, then I looked up.

The kitchen door was closed. I must have forgotten to put something in the way to block it. I stood there rocking in the wind and the windblown snow and clenched and unclenched my hands, and I was already losing feeling in my toes. The old frostbite wounds at the end of my nose and the tips of my ring fingers began to ache, and I realized my breathing was too quick and too shallow. I recognized that I was panicking.

One breath at a time. One step at a time. Up the stairs. The door hadn’t closed all the way. It had caught on the mechanism.

I sat on the bed with my hands in my armpits and rocked back and forth and evened out my breath. I remembered I could have gone back into the boiler house. I wondered if I would have remembered that if that door hadn’t been unlocked, and I wasn’t sure. I sat there and rolled cigarettes until the papers were all gone. I opened the door and stepped into the hall. Stepped into something wet. I kept walking down through the gym and the laundry room and into the shop before I remembered to go put my boots on so I wouldn’t step on anything sharp. My socks were soaking wet when I pulled them on.

A couple cigarettes into pacing along the shop windows and I thought a cat could have done that, could have made those wet spots and left the footprints outside and those little skeletons too. I’d left the boiler house door open that afternoon. A cat had come in to get warm, then squeezed into that little walkway, followed the glycol lines into the school, and had made the wet spots.

But a cat couldn’t fit in that hole. An ermine could.

My first year, I’d seen the looping track of one like a necklace running out from the school and back, and I’d set a trap for it that Jean Belette had found. He asked me what I planned to do with it when I caught him. I had a nice blue parka, and I thought the white fur of the ermine would make a nice ruff.

“If it’s a ruff you want, get a lynx. Longer fur’ll keep the snow off your face. Show you how to catch one or damn near anything else you want. I leave them alone, though, the ermines, that is, out of a mutual kinship since that’s what my name means.”

I’d joked how I’d never heard a man favorably compare himself to a weasel before. He looked at me and said, “Well, I can tell where you’re from.”

We left the ermines alone. We instead caught a little lynx for my ruff and it kept the snow out and I wore that parka until I started using it as my tent. I slept under it every winter until the shrews got into it and made their nests and their tunnels and their city and kept the whole thing writhing like something on fire.

The snow stopped. I stepped out. The snow stopped because it had gotten colder. The stars twinkled the way they did in deep winter. Some of them seemed to be out of place. I watched them for a while. None of them moved. I went back to pacing, and at the far end of the door, I heard something underfoot. It sounded hollow. It was a square of plywood, three feet on each side, with no handle. I put my ear to it and knocked. The echo went on for a while. I found a flathead screwdriver, worked it into the crack, and pried it open.

I’d left the flashlight in the boiler house.

I cleaned the lint trap of the dryer and took a couple of dryer sheets, wrapped the lint in the sheets, tied the corners, walked back to the pit, lay down, reached out the bundle with one hand and my lighter with the other, and touched the flame to it and let it fall. It was a long time falling, sometimes floating back up an inch or two, like on a breath. It rocked and buffeted a little but never went out.

As it got close to the bottom, I could see that most of the bottom was covered in water, except that right under it was a book and the pages were open, and I could see handwriting. The bundle landed on it and lit the pages, and the pages flared up, and it all went black again.

I thought about finding the tug-of-war rope and tying it around my waist and the other end around the bandsaw and lowering myself down at least enough to grab that book. I closed the lid behind me and stayed there until the stars were gone.

There was a movement in the corner of my eye. No. Just the twinkling of a star.

It’s the third time you see them, that’s what the old man said after I’d seen that one tracking our wingtip leaving out of Phoenix. I swore under my breath, and looked up, and our eyes locked. I didn’t know if last night had counted as two or as three or if he was right.

I stepped outside.

The smoke from Ted’s chimney across the street ran out like silt from the mouth of a river and fell below the eaves of the roof and hung there in grey puddles. I could feel the skin of my hand freezing to the doorknob. There was no moon.

I could see the Mountain and I thought that it could see me back. The Mountain was white and terrible like some older god. It had always been there waiting at that point in space. Why so bright? What light did she reflect?

My head swam, and the cold hurt my lungs. I shut the door behind me. I didn’t go back out.

In the morning, Miss Waitshrill unlocked the office, and I took another sweater and a pair of coveralls. I had two gold coins in my pocket that I’d cut from the hem of my jacket. Even with my coveralls, jacket, and the two sweaters, I had to keep moving to stay warm. The wind off the runway was cold. Around lunchtime, a Caravan circled three times then landed. While I talked to the pilot, I made sure he could see me fidgeting with one of the coins. He took it when we shook hands.

“You’ll have to find someone to give you their seat, though.”

R.J. had one foot on the ladder. I’d seen him pull up. He’d been saying goodbye to Renee.

“Look, man,” he said after I’d asked him, looking over my shoulder toward Renee, sitting on his bike at the edge of the gravel, “I gotta get into town. My girl drove down from Nenana, and she’s waiting on me.”

“Flip a coin if you have to,” said the pilot. “Don’t matter to me.”

He already had my coin. He’d keep it either way. The only coin I had was the other gold one. I needed that for the manifest agent. I showed R.J. and suggested that heads, I go and you keep the coin; tails, you keep the coin, and I go; or the third option: I’d see if anyone else on the plane needed an ounce of solid gold.

He hesitated.

I shouted past him to see if anyone else wanted an ounce of solid gold. He stepped off the ladder and asked the pilot for his bag, and I handed him the coin.

Lifting off, I looked down at the swamp past Glenn’s. There was a set of four-wheeler tracks crossing it in the snow. The bull moose was down there, and I saw him standing in the middle of that swamp and I could tell something was wrong. He was bent over, and in place of his head a shapeless lump of white, the antlers sticking out and the velvet torn and streaming out in the wind and the red blood showing and his skin stretched taut like a skin boat. When he inhaled, the ribbons stood out. When he exhaled, I knew that the condensation of his hot breath was freezing another layer to the inside of that white mass around his head. His breathing seemed to keep time with the pulse of the turboprop, and soon the layers of ice would build up around his head. Eac exhale tightened the grip, and he’d suffocate soon, or he’d freeze soon or somebody would shoot him.

By the time we were over Little Sinai and had climbed up high enough to get over the mountains, I was getting tired. Plane rides are when I missed that blue parka the most—the down hood fluffy enough for me to lean my head back into it and fall asleep to the roar of the engine. After they let me out of the resource center, I wandered around Midtown with it on until I found a nice spot in those trees by Tommy’s Burgers where I’d set it up as a little tent. It was a good spot. Close enough to Dankorage that I didn’t have to walk far to fill my federal weed stipend for persons experiencing houselessness, and once they got to know my face, they never made me show my ID, though they did always put the mandatory MAID flyer in my bag. I rolled them up and used them as little torches until one burned a hole in the sleeve of the parka. That’s how the shrews got in.

I fell asleep.

I must have slept for a long time. It was cloudy, and I could barely see the tips of the wings. That was good. I didn’t want to see far. The tips seemed to be fading, too. We must be getting deeper into the clouds. The lights at the wingtips were barely visible. It crept up to the spars under the wings, and then it was pressing against the windows. It had a stickiness to it. It didn’t seem like we were moving through a cloud at all, but that we were parked, and fog was coming up from the ground, and even that wasn’t right because it wasn’t like a fog, it was like water, pressing up against the walls of the plane and the windows and looking for a way in.

“Like water, isn’t it?” I heard myself say aloud.

And then, “How long have we been in this stuff anyway?”

No one answered me. It was too close. It was trying to get into the crack around the window, trying to make a crack so it could get in. There was a song in my head that I couldn’t get out, and I started humming it. We ought to be past the mountains now, past the Mountain now. We’d been in the air a long time because I’d been asleep a long time.

I remembered the first words, “There’s no earthly way of knowing,” then I realized I was humming, “Which direction we are going,” louder than I thought. There was not a speck of light showing, and the cloud had rolled past the prop and through the windshield and was covering the pilot.

The danger must be growing, I thought, and I could hear them all turning to look at me.

“Who set the fires of Hell a-glowing?”

I couldn’t see their faces because they were all wearing hoodies.

“Who is the grizzly reaper mowing?”

“Can’t anyone tell me when we’re getting off this God-Damned plane!” I screamed until my voice melded with the engine’s whine.